#Tech4Worse: The problem with digital labour initiatives for the Middle East

Contrary to their marketing, digital labor schemes don’t work in spite of predicaments like the occupation or the refugee crisis - they work because of them.

Graffiti on the separation wall in the West Bank, Palestine. Photo by Wall in Palestine. Flickr.com (CC BY-SA 2.0) Some rights reserved.“Be
yOuR OwN BosS.” Two twenty-something Palestinians are pictured
leaning over an iPad and laughing: a ColourSplash™ filter makes
their eyes and frayed festival wristbands glow a radioactive green.
Their suits are whatever they put on that morning and their offices
are wherever they turned their screens on. On a Facebook
group for
online freelancing work in Gaza and the West Bank, these mantras come
up again and again.

The
idea is that regardless of your circumstances, anyone can live the
hipster millennial dream and “work where they want when they want”
thanks to the internet. In places like Palestine with unemployment
rates of 30% (the highest
in the world)
and movement violently
restricted by
a series of checkpoints, borders and military zones, profit-making
activities in the ‘placeless’ digital realm can be viewed as a
way of overcoming these obstacles.

The
World Bank’s “m2work”
project in cooperation with Nokia took precisely this approach. It
was just one of a series of initiatives in the past few years led by
governments or private sector actors that have identified the Arab
world as a region in which microwork has “vast potential” as a
means of alleviating poverty. But this rhetoric of flexibility
and entrepreneurship so common to neoliberal development agendas
conceals some ugly realities.

There
are a few really exciting grassroots initiatives such as Gaza
Sky Geeks that
are also using digital labour. But when western
bodies like the World Bank, the Rockefeller
Foundation or
multinational NGOs
propose
the introduction of exploitative gig economy platforms as some kind
of blanket solution to the problems of an entire region (or way of
profiting off them), these realities need to be highlighted. Tech for
good isn’t always good and here’s why in this case:

1.
Digital labour platforms are unregulated and exploitative

“Mechanical
Turk” is an example of a digital labour platform run by Amazon that
draws on “human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are
currently unable to do.” Microwork portals harness virtual crowds
to organize playlists of music, tag videos and images, write,
translate or transcribe short texts and in doing so train artificial
intelligence software.

Wage rates plummet as people around the world bid to complete tasks for cheaper and cheaper prices

Microwork
is just one part of a broader spectrum of digital labour that ranges
from on-demand services such as Uber to data extraction via social
media such as Facebook. This continuum of unpaid, micropaid and
poorly paid ‘taskified’ human activities means that work can no
longer easily be distinguished from leisure time. Because of this,
it’s really hard to talk about exploitation, a word usually
associated with industrial labour’s sweatshop conditions, in
relation to digital labour. It’s also hard to reconcile people not
always feeling like these activities are work that warrants
compensation with their objective creation of a great deal of
economic value.

But
structural conditions can’t be reduced to individual pleasure or
preference. Loads of studies have shown how paid digital labour
platforms seriously threaten basic workers protections. While the
median hourly rate on Amazon Mechanical Turk is $1.38, tasks are
completed for as little
as $0.01. Wage
rates plummet as people around the world bid to complete tasks for
cheaper and cheaper prices. Opportunities for promotion or
skill-development are near non-existent as
workers are unable to access information about core business
processes.

Bodies
are also regimented to the demands of capital in new ways to the
physical discipline of the factory. Refugees in Lebanon’s Shatila
camp
who engage in a range of digital labour activities from freelance
programming to online games with virtual currencies are forced to
adjust their sleeping patterns to the demands of (western) capital.
Teenagers keep their phone buzzers on loud while they sleep in order
to respond at any hour or consume endless energy drinks to work or
play through the night. Other studies of micro-workers around the
world or “gold-farmers”
in China have shown how these activities result in repetitive strain
injuries or severe eye problems.

Crucially,
there are no opportunities for collective action to resist these
conditions as workers are totally isolated by the platform. Despite
this, in the US there have been some creative efforts to fight back
against the precarity and exploitation that define microwork. These
include the ‘Dynamo’
email campaign (and
quasi-union) and the FairCrowdwork monitoring
system designed by IG Metall in 2015.

2.
They reproduce a global division of labour based on historical
patterns of domination and dependency

The
way in which digital platforms leverage gender, class and race
disparities to extract unpaid/underpaid digital labour hasn’t been
addressed by any of these campaigns. These questions are crucial to
understanding the implications of the expansion of this kind of work
into the Arab world.

Protections are not risky. Making someone dependent for their survival on an algorithm with zero accountability is risky

The
“m2Work” project seeks to overcome “geographic obstacles” in
order to offer employment opportunities to local youth and women. But
this emphasis on “overcoming” geography detracts from the very
real ways in which uneven global geographies of power, wealth and
knowledge play out in the field of global digital labour. A study
by the Oxford Internet Institute based
on 60,000 anonymized transactions completed on Upwork revealed a
clear neo-colonial pattern of dependence as ‘tasks’ are sold from
India and the Philippines to the US, Australia or the UK. This
results in the same toxic race to the bottom that has defined
industrial production for the past 30 years.

It
is significant that the World Bank thinks that Gaza and the West Bank
are “particularly
relevant”
destinations for microwork. In the global race to the bottom, the
‘bottom’ is an open-air prison and an area under military
occupation. According to their 2014 report, these sites pose “limited
risks” to employers in terms of having to pay any full time
employment benefits or a minimum wage. Protections are not ‘risky.’
Making someone dependent for their survival on an algorithm with zero
accountability is risky. Not paying them an adequate hourly rate to
feed themselves or their family is risky. Irregular or excessive
working hours resulting in repetitive strain, eye problems or
insomnia are risky.

One
of the big selling points of digital workplaces is also that
they are blind to race and gender. There haven’t yet been any
comprehensive studies of the way in which racialised identities play
out on platforms like Mechanical Turk. However, Nakamura’s
work on
racialized forms of labour on massive multiplayer online games
exposes the same phenomenon. The term “Chinese gold-farmer” in
gaming chatrooms has come to stand for all worker-players completing
repetitive tasks to sell virtual goods or characters for real money
just as the term “Mexican gardener” stands in for all dark
skinned men cutting lawns. Syrian players in Shatila who viewed their
gaming activities as leisure rather than work complained that their
broken English or Arab names meant they were viewed by other players
as unwanted guest workers or ‘gold-farmers.’

3.
They profit off rather than tackling the political realities that
result in unemployment

The
World Bank’s m2work borrows heavily from the Samasource initiative,
a non-profit business that seeks to alleviate poverty by outsourcing
digital work from Walmart, eBay etc. to impoverished populations. But
contrary to their marketing, these schemes don’t work in spite
of predicaments like the occupation or the refugee crisis - they
work because of them.

Like the prison industrial complex that profits off the unpaid or underpaid labour of inmates, these initiatives thrive off social and political upheaval and structural deformities in the Middle East.

In
many ways, digital labour plays perfectly into the logic of the
refugee camp or the blockaded territory whereby subjects must be kept
alive, but only just. Now, even bodies stripped of their political
existence, of the rights and protections of the law, can be rendered
productive. Through online platforms, residents can literally work
within their figurative jail cells. Their integration into the global
economy as cheap outsourcers makes users dependent not only on Israel
or on a host state but on technology as well.

These
unconcealed efforts to overcome local regulation in the
global
south
to serve the interests of western
platforms are part of a broader pattern of “tech for good.”
Tawil-souri argues that we must recognise the underside of the
“progress” represented by the Internet’s
role in Palestinian society.
This includes “an alienated society controlled from above, the
degradation and destruction of much employment, the further
concentration and consolidation of corporate capital, and the
imposition of its criteria and priorities on the nation state.”

Toufic
Haddad has coined the term “Palestine
Ltd”
to describe the series of western
donor policies based on the premise that “the market’s invisible
hand will guide Israelis and Palestinians to peace.” Palestine has
become a very profitable business for a number of investors from
donors to western
states. The m2work project is only the latest manifestation of the
World Bank’s priority to encourage private-sector growth as the
path to Palestinian state-building since the 1990s. But this
willfully
ignores the political realities of settler-colonialism. Last year,
the UN found that the Palestinian economy would be at least twice
as large if
the Israeli occupation was lifted.

The ‘Mechanical Turk’ was originally an 18th century Chess Player Automaton secretly operated inside by a real person. With his turban and curled mustache, this pipe-smoking ‘Turk’ was part of a craze for automata designed to resemble the oriental “Other” based on the trope in Christian theology of the docile and obedient Muslim. As workers in impoverished areas, from Syrian refugee camps to the Palestinian occupied territories, are forced to perform these repetitive, unskilled tasks, (concealed behind a slick, anonymized interface) the ‘muslim-as-machine’ trope takes on new meanings. Machine-like, always-on, this “surplus population” can always be tapped into by companies to fuel the 24-hour business cycle that drives western progress.

About the author

Miranda
Hall is a freelance journalist and research assistant at SOAS
specialising in digital labour. She is currently working on online
campaigns for cruise workers with the Organise Platform and Gig
Economy workers with IWGB. Find her at @Miranda__Hall

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